Tuesday, May 13, 2014

[ACKS LEXICON] Barghast Race

I ran a successful LARP for 7 years, called Lexicon, subtitled "A Game of Exploration and Discovery in a Broken World of Intrigue and Intolerance." It was a game of gods, men, and monsters, set in a world physically destroyed by the plummeting corpse of it's creator deity a millenia ago. The little nations and tribes of the world were forced to bend ley-lines to their will to physically draw lands together through what basically amounted to the Ether for travel and trade.

The players were a few dozen poorly equipped adventurers settled in a little place in the middle of nowhere and wound up being incredibly important on the world stage. I liked to describe the setting and feel as "You play D&D characters in a Warhammer setting, fighting to prevent the world from turning back into Exalted."

So, mid-level powered folks in a grim, unhappy world of ruin. The world that came before was more magically advanced, but it too was a flawed place, where the actions of an evil Empire led to it's own destruction, the lessening of the world, and the entrance of the Nightmare (Chaos) physically into the world.

I got the worm today to try to put together some stuff from that campaign a la ACKS. This will be my first entry on that topic- one of the races, the beastmen known as Barghasts. (No relation to D&D barghests or to the Malazan pseudohumans, of course...) It turned out over the course of the LARP campaign that there was a lot going on in their history beyond "primitive cannibal folk", and perhaps if this Lex fire stays lit, I will get to the Stygian Empire, Barza, Whitewalker, and the Barukasta.

For now, I am just presenting the Racial Values for ACKS. I will probably build a class or two later on for them.